Stef Conner released a new album – called The Flood and she singing in ancient Sumerian and Babylonian. She is accompanied by Andy Lowings you plays a harp-like reconstructed musical instrument. Beautiful, unknown – but still familiar.

]]>http://www.fifth-music.com/the-positive-emotional-impact-of-sad-music/feed/0How Did the Violin Get Its Shape?http://www.fifth-music.com/how-did-the-violin-get-its-shape/
http://www.fifth-music.com/how-did-the-violin-get-its-shape/#commentsWed, 22 Oct 2014 06:58:12 +0000http://www.fifth-music.com/?p=1734

Interesting podcast about the shape of violins. Listen to it on Science Friday.

From its role in biological systems to cultural products, “shape is information that can tell us a story,” says biologist Dan Chitwood. Chitwood tells us how morphology and mimicry played a role in the evolution of the modern day violin.

When sound hits an object, it causes small vibrations of the object’s surface. We show how, using only high-speed video of the object, we can extract those minute vibrations and partially recover the sound that produced them, allowing us to turn everyday objects—a glass of water, a potted plant, a box of tissues, or a bag of chips—into visual microphones. We recover sounds from highspeed footage of a variety of objects with different properties, and use both real and simulated data to examine some of the factors that affect our ability to visually recover sound. We evaluate the quality of recovered sounds using intelligibility and SNR metrics and provide input and recovered audio samples for direct comparison. We also explore how to leverage the rolling shutter in regular consumer cameras to recover audio from standard frame-rate videos, and use the spatial resolution of our method to visualize how sound-related vibrations vary over an object’s surface, which we can use to recover the vibration modes of an object.

Glyph is a projection sculpture with references to ritual monuments such as obelisks or stelas. It deals with cyclic change and constantly regenerates itself. An alphabet based on fundamental geometric shapes (rectangle, circle and triangle) acts as a communication device as well as a pure aesthetic element. All texts displayed are permanently evolving and restructured based on linguistic rules.
The installation runs in realtime – the video shows a random segment recorded at schmiede 2011.
Made with processing & reaktor
supported by Subnet AiR, Schmiede, Polypod, Waldschuetz Photography, Show2Go, Holzcraft

This is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1213 genres by The Echo Nest. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.